The expansion of datacentres in Europe has increased in the past three to four years, due to the growing demand for information storage and transfer from banks, hospitals, government bodies, telecom operators and hosting facilities, according to a report from Frost & Sullivan.
The firm forecasts that the datacentre market will expand at a rate of 5-10% over the next few years and will continue to show strong growth for many years thereafter, both in Europe and worldwide.
However, such growth will negatively impact the environment, with datacentre greenhouse gas emissions overtaking those caused by the airline industry within the next 5-10 years.
Vijay Sridhar, research analyst for the energy and power systems group at Frost & Sullivan, said: "While datacentres currently account for 3% of total energy consumption worldwide, datacentre greenhouse gas emissions are expected to overtake airline industry emission within the next 5-10 years.
"On the other hand, the datacentre industry is transforming as enterprises shift their infrastructure spending from owned or leased facilities to third-party hosted and managed services. The convergence of these trends will usher in vast opportunities for virtualisation and green IT and energy efficient power and cooling solutions in datacentres."
